Aquaculture boom beckons

Australia rates as one of only a handful of countries with just about all the right qualifications to sustainably and safely supply big volumes to what is traditionally the world's most enthusiastic seafood and farmed aquaculture market, right on our doorstep.

Production opportunities will extend from the chilly ocean currents of southern Australia, to coastal region farmland around the continent and even large-scale inland farms established to grow fish and, shrimp and prawns.

Our biggest problem is Australians don't comprehend the size and value of this opportunity, according to global acquaculture specialist with Rabobank, Gorjan Nikolik.

"Australia has the land, the clean water, the environmental credentials and the skills - I'm so impressed, it's got so much opportunity," he said.

"Some places like Tasmania have everything going for them, including already having sophisticated, well-established production and processing businesses."

Although integrated aquaculture was already proving to be "much more profitable than dairy or beef", Mr Nikolik said Australia's many traditional broadacre farming options appeared to have blinded most of our agribusiness sector to the prizes on offer from fish farming.

"The value of global seafood consumption is likely to grow much faster than volume," he said.

Since 1980 farmed seafood, including freshwater production, had exploded from servicing only a tiny proportion of the total market to now almost equalling the 90 million tonne wild catch.

With the wild catch plateauing, Mr Nikolik said farmed products would cater for all future growth in global seafood supplies as the industry grew to be worth about 200m tonnes a year by 2024.

While almost two thirds of global aquaculture currently occurred in China, where it was largely based on carp and mussel production, today's rising personal incomes, a population drift to cities and the desire for a more varied diet with more prestigious species on the menu had shifted Chinese demand towards imported lobster, salmon, oysters, shrimp and sushimi.

Concerns about the health risks associated with China's intense inland and coastal fisheries, water supply limitations, water quality and declining farm labour availability were also set to contribute to its $20 billion a year aquaculture export industry shrinking rapidly in the next two decades.

In Australia for an international aquaculture conference and visit farming operations in Tasmania and Queensland last week, Mr Nikolik said total Chinese seafood consumption alone currently represented more than the western world, Russia, Japan and Brazil combined, and was growing fast.

Rabobank has a 3.2b euro loan portfolio with large-scale and corporate fish farming and processing businesses around the world.

Along with Norway, Canada, Scotland, Ireland and parts of the US and Latin America, he said Australia had perfect credentials to be a leading producer, including the land, water and suitable climate for farms, grain crops to help feed them, the space to isolate farms for biosecurity, reasonable infrastructure and legislative support, and the technology.

"Aquaculture is a young and fast developing industry which needs high-tech inputs and skills -it's not like farming goats in Africa and it's not an industry that can be easily commoditised," he said.

"Australia probably already has some of the best managed fisheries in the world.

"It also has some impressive vertically integrated business like Huon and Tassal and feed companies, notably Ridley, doing great things to supply the growth formulations this industry needs."

But despite producing 40,000t of salmon a year, Australia imported more.

Less developed countries such as Ecuador were kicking bigger goals in the global aquaculture market, including three times our volume of farmed Bluefin tuna output.

"There is more talk about new aquaculture development than a few years ago, but there's still a lot of opportunities and legislative support which need to be acted on quite urgently."